When you can register and use your own domain for you blog (custom domain) and Blogger can host your blog for you gratis (free), it makes me wonder why would anyone still wants to use the outdated classic Blogger template, host the blog themselves and use the more cumbersome FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to publish their posts. Hosting the blog ourselves means we have to pay monthly charges, amount of storage, worry about whether the bandwidth we purchased is sufficient, worry about the reputation of the web host, security, down time and a host of other issues.
In any case, old classic Blogger template will soon be history as Blogger is stopping support, so if you want to insist on hosting the blog yourself, you will have to migrate your blog to Wordpress.org or any of the other blogging software.
The question of why anyone would want self-hosted blogs still remains. I tried some research, but it mainly turned up posts that are way off track because they discussed pros and cons between free blogspot.com or wordpress.com blogs which are sub-domains of Blogger and Wordpress versus blogs like this (www.bloggertipsandtricks.com, no blogspot in URL) which even though uses my own domain, is hosted by Blogger.com free). One example of a post not hitting the mark is 10 Reasons to Self Host Your Own Blog.
That leaves to think up of old issues encountered in the past plus guesswork. I remembered us trying to Google sitemap for our blog. The method described is but a workaround using the RSS/Atom feed and is not a real Google sitemap. For that you need direct access to the server which we bloggers using custom domain don't have.
So the crucial item is direct access to the server which would be needed if whatever you want need you to directly control what goes on in the backroom behind the scene with your blog. Such as you need that when a visitor fills in a form and the database is altered, based on some preset conditions, some events are set into motion and displayed to the visitor.
At the moment, I am toying with the idea of creating a forum as a sub-domain of one of the blog I am helping manage and I suspect that may need to be self-hosted. If you know of any other reasons which forces self-hosting, please let us know by leaving a comment.
Very few bloggers would need that, but if you ever do, then it is time to self-host and its attending headaches. So I just wonder if this web host rating is at least a partial solution for your headaches. What caught my eyes are those Best this and Best that categories in that website, in particular, the Best Blog Host and since I am thinking of setting up a forum, the Best Forum Host. Unfortunately, I could not find any references as to why these 2 were chosen as the Best Blog Host or the Best Forum Host. I think I will shoot off an enquiary to them.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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